If beacons would be wide-spread on a railway station, what cases would be interesting to use them? What electronically supported services for customer could be?
Dear Walter,
This is very good topic.
For the first discussion I think that is very important to have overview of different type of passenger. For example young people would like to have different type of information then older people. Another very important thing is that when we put different type of equipment at railway station it would be useful for all population group including people with disabilities. It would be good to carry out research on information and form required for a certain group of the population. Rail is the place for sure that we need to pay attention, but I think in all parts of Europe, and rest of world, will not be possible to implement the same principle because of economic disparities in development.
If you continue the research I'm interested to see the results, or perhaps to take part in it.
Dear Water:
I think customer information in stations using WIFI or bluetooth teccnologies have several posibilities. Infrastructure Administrators may provide posonalized inormation not only about timetables, also about station services.
So station services locations, as meeting points, ticket offices, shops. This information combined with augmented reality would have great value. Also information about operations may be interesting for customers as train location on tracks, timetables, delays.
To get economic support for these activities advertising can be integrated in this infrastructure, So a film premier poster can be complemented with information via bluetooth. A tax supplement for this kind of service can be added to the advertising company. A full data sets of information can be obteined from advertising activities.
I think there are a lot of applications of these platforms to provide information
There's an important distinction to be made here: Bluetooth is local (and relatively unsecured, so that's problematic) because its range is so short, and because the services it provides (https://www.bluetooth.org/en-us/specification/adopted-specifications) are developed around that very-close-range characteristic.
Wi-fi, however, is typically provided in order to give users a gateway to the Internet at large. Conceivably the information directly relevant to the railway station could be provided only within the LAN, but that raises needless problems--how are fileshares going to be set up, and security assured between users, for example. It sounds like the examples you're thinking about are things that would typically be available as web-based services instead, which from the users' point of view would be vastly preferable: browser-based, SSL-protected, Web-navigated.
And if they're web-based, they're NOT local. They're available anywhere the Web is available. Of course there are plenty of good reasons to provide such services. The point here is that the only contribution of the railway station Wi-fi beacon is to provide Internet access, which customers will then use to do whatever it is they typically do on the Internet regardless of where they are. If I were a services provider, I would create the web pages not because they are available in the railway station (if they're on the Web, they're available *everywhere*), but because I think my users want/need them generally, regardless of whether there happens to be Wi-Fi service at the railway station. I would expect railway station passengers passing through to access the Internet through cellphone data plans anyway, without the need for a wi-fi gateway.